Soft Mousepads
Soft mousepads have been used by gamers since pretty much the beginning of games. You can buy them anywhere: Retail stores, LAN centers, and online. However, the mousepad industry is creating some amazing soft surfaces that go far beyond anything you can purchase at your local Best Buy. Here are some of the top soft gaming surfaces on the market today.

Aqua3
Manufacturer: X-ray Technology LTD
Type of pad: Soft, single surface
Material: Cloth (very fine woven fabric)
Size: 15.7” x 11” (also available at 17.7”x13.8”)
Price: $12.00

X-ray entered the gaming scene in 2003 and was followed by a slow buzz over it's products. X-ray's Thunder8 mousepad was very highly regarded at time of release and for good reason. It was a solid alternative to Func Industries' sUrface 1030, the original dual surface mousepad. The success of the Thunder8 seemed to overshadow some of X-ray's other products, including the Aqua3.

The Aqua3 comes rolled up in a long rectangular box. For the life of me I cant seem to grasp the reason why companies would package their products rolled up when it is meant to lie flat. The only advantages I see are saving maybe 1 cent on cardboard area. Any thin non-rigid material when rolled up will at least partially retain that rolled up form when spread out flat. The same certainly holds true for this mousepad, as it took a bit of work and reverse bending for it to lie perfectly flat. Granted, once It was flat it stayed that way for the rest of it's use, but just the fact that I had to do something to the pad to make it flat was somewhat annoying. I would also like to stress that the particular model of Aqua3 I received (A315M, there are 4 different models) is one of the 2 thinner models. This mousepad is amazingly thin, a mere 1.5 millimeters. I found this to be a rather nice feature, as it gave the what-would-be-huge mousepad a bit of a smaller feel. I would imagine that this would also be quite beneficial in terms of ease of transportation, as it can adapt to different spaces a bit better than a traditional cloth pad.

For starters, the Aqua3 is a pretty nice looking mousepad. The surface is quite glossy due to the tightly woven fabric that it consists of. I like to compare the cloth to silk, as it is just as shiny and about as smooth. The design is also plain and simple: all black with a red, white, and blue logo in the top right. It gives it that sense of simplicity and minimalism that is desirable these days. The glossiness no doubt also contributes to the excellent performance of optical mice that the mousepad offers. I used this pad for a whole day and not once did I experience any problems with tracking on the optical mouse. The mousepad also seems to be fully compatible with laser and ball mice. Like most smooth cloth surfaces, this mousepad is meant to be ideal for quick gaming movements while maintaining a good amount of control, and it does that quite well. I also found this mousepad to be quite nice to use in Adobe Photoshop CS, as it was quite easy to crop some edges of a large picture before applying a filter and without having to pick up my mouse and risk letting go of the mouse button. As far as gaming is concerned, this mousepad seemed like it should be ideal for a game like Quake 4 (which I am terrible at) where I tend to strafe around a lot and spray out machine gun bullets and lightning gun charge like nothing. While actually playing the game however, I noticed that there were weird delays when I moved the mouse; it seemed like I wasn't getting the crosshair movement I expected from the distance I was moving the mouse. After some examination I found that the mousepad itself was actually a considerable amount on my desk. In fact, the only time the mousepad did not slip was when I put absolutely no weight on the mouse and pushed it from side to side with my fingers while my hand was elevated. Curious as to why the mousepad was slipping on my desk when the box clearly states one of its features is “Slip-Free rubber base grips your table firmly.” I tried the mousepad on several other desks. To my surprise all of the desks produced the same results. The mousepad would just not stay still when any amount of weight was used while moving the mouse. Granted, the amount of movement in most cases was around a centimeter when moving the mouse 3/4 of the way across the mousepad, and was constant in all directions of movement so theoretically if you used the mousepad enough you would probably get used to it. But for all intents and purposes, the Aqua3 mousepad does not seem to grip wood or glass surfaces very well at all.

In spite of the very nice surface that the mousepad offers, its construction in general is nothing special. In only 1 day's worth of use, I can already see places in the corners and along the bottom where the fabric surface is starting to curl off of the rubber pad part, a common problem with most cloth pads. However, this really is not a big deal, and in fact the degree of separation between the two materials is much less than it was after a day's worth of use on the control mousepad. Also, the fact that all aspects of the mousepad are considerably thinner than most every other cloth pad, the curling is not nearly as big of a deal as it would be on a mousepad of normal thickness. All in all the Aqua3 is a nice mousepad for those who want a cloth pad with substantially more size than a normal Best Buy mousepad and a very nice cloth surface. I would guess that the A330L model of the Aqua3, which is a good 2 inches larger and is twice as thick as the A315M, offers a little bit better gripping capacity and is the ideal mousepad for low mouse sensitivity gamers who are looking for a replacement to their withered Supermats. Perhaps this explains why the Aqua3 is the official mousepad of the eSports World Cup.

Pros:
+Large size
+Nice looking
+Glossy and smooth surface
+Very thin

Cons:
-Does not grip desk well
-Comes rolled up in package

Score:
6/10